Observations of Small Town Living (OOSTL)

I gotta guy fer dat… Big towns, everything needed is within a 30 minute drive at some store. I used to buy candy bars that once were only available in Australia from a nearby market. Small town, not so much. In fact, many things you need aren’t at a store. But if you ask around, there’s always “a guy” who has or does that. If you don’t take the time to get to know as many people as possible, you may miss out on your six degrees of separation between you and the thing you need. The price you pay for this anti-social behavior is that you can probably buy it somewhere at a premium.

What you need in this rural area is often unheard of in the city.
Examples I’ve observed:

Len: Everything Horses
A few miles up the mountain live a great guy named Len. If you need to scramble to find a horse for your niece to ride – Len. Need horse manure for your garden, or in our cause lawn? Answer: Len. Here’s picture of a fresh trailer full of manure that I’m spreading out on the lawn in hopes that it will add some magic ingredient to grow grass. Now our yard smells like Len. Don’t tell him I said that or he’ll cut off my supply of poo.

Dale: What a lawn mower is to a suburban home, a chainsaw is aroundÂ here. And rather than weeds, land owners often have to get rid of some of those pesky trees that have popped up over the last 25 years when nobody was looking. Jobs like this are often a bit more than the average home owner would want to tackle. And that’s where Dale comes in. Burning several million calories a day, he acts about 30 but is as “old as the hills” (his words, not mine). For the price of the donated trees, he’ll cut, split and haul away your troubles after burning the slash pile he created in the process. If you’re a person the burns wood to heat your home and can’t harvest your own due to injury or age, Dale will do everything he can to have you stocked up for the winter.

Got vermin too cute to kill? Yep, there’s a guy for that. Well, not just a guy. You can call just about any man, woman and child in the area who will gladly come over for some target practice before hunting season. That is, unless you have a no kill policy as we do (blame Jenny). So, the ground squirrels that are infesting our yard with bigger and bigger holes are trapped alive and taken away to a local nature preserve where they can happily live out the rest of their lives – til the coyotes get them (don’t tell Jenny). The coyotes give me $1 a head. I’m their guy for that.

Hairy-Eggs? My neighbor, Hairy (yes, that’s how you spell it), started growing chickens in his back yard. It wasn’t long before his new pets started producing more eggs that he and his wife could woof down. So, now Jenny and I get to enjoy cackle-berries that aren’t pasteurized, have thick tan shells, and are fertilized. Hairy says that fertilized eggs have less cholesterol and while that’s not true, we’re not going to correct him unless he reads this post. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2010 at 9:08 am and is filed under OOSTL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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